McLean, Va – Several hours before Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults Friday in an attack on a school in Newtown, Conn., a 36-year-old man a half-a-world away in China attacked 22 children at a primary school. None of the kids died. The reason? The man in China had only a knife.

Troubled or deranged attackers are not an American phenomenon. Guns are. Guns make the attacker more lethal. There have indeed been shooting incidents in other countries. The school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, where 16 kids were shot dead right after a morning assembly, bears an eerie similarity to Newtown. An outraged Britain demanded a ban on handguns and Labour Party leader Tony Blair rode over gun lobby objections to pass the law after he came to power the following year.

One day after the killings in Newtown, as a close community woke up to overwhelming grief among the holiday decorations, the politics of gun control have already started to churn in Washington. Supporters such as Michael Bloomberg call on leaders to make changes, and even President Obama gave a nod to things having to change in his response to the shooting.

But in a country where politicians are barely able to talk about gun control, actual change remains a pipe dream. The experts tell us that mass shootings are down over the last several years. But in the last five months, they have erupted with depressing regularity. A school in Connecticut. A mall in Oregon. A Sikh temple in Wisconsin. A movie theater in Colorado. A murder/suicide in the NFL. This past week we actually experienced two in just the space of a few days.

When I worked in a newsroom in London in the 1990s, during the time of the Dunblane incident, it was hardly ever worth the effort to wonder where a shooting had occurred when the wire services flashed headlines saying a gunman had killed several people. With the exception of Dunblane, it was always the U.S.

We cling to our legal rights to guns as a matter of pride in our heritage, as a point of being able to protect ourselves as we have through our history. But we don't see the collective price of our stubbornness, either in lost lives or in how the rest of the world perceives us.

Victims' faces flash across our TVs, and iPads and mobile phones; their sad, holiday tragedies a distraction from our daily activities. And we shake our heads in disbelief. But nobody takes a stand.

President Obama paid little attention to gun control in his first term. It's a divisive issue, and he was carrying plenty of them into an election. Frankly, in a country which has assassinated presidents with guns in its history, it wouldn't surprise me if he was a bit worried about his family. I would be.

But in his second term, with his last chance to make history, now is the time to stand on this issue, which is ripping us apart town by town, family by family. The country is divided and the votes are probably not there. But it is finally time to have the discussion and for someone among our leaders to stand up to a two-century old tradition whose time for change has come.

David Callaway is Editor-in-Chief of USA TODAY. His opinions are his own and do not reflect the views of the editorial page of USA TODAY.